RX14 - ABM and Demand Gen Have Converged. Now What? | Davis Potter

In this week's episode of the Revenue Xchange, host Davis unpacks the convergence of ABM and Demand Generation, introduces the concept of an Account Investment Strategy, and cuts through the noise on buying groups.

Key Takeaways:
1.) ABM and Demand Gen Have Converged: Standalone ABM teams are being reintegrated into demand gen organizations. The most mature programs are doing this thoughtfully by enabling demand gen teams with account-based principles, not just reshuffling org charts.
2.) Think Account Investment Strategy, Not Just ABM: Instead of debating naming conventions, leaders should focus on how they deploy budget, resources, and capacity across accounts based on revenue potential and strategic importance, aligning one-to-one, one-to-few, and one-to-many models to what the business actually needs.
3.) Buying Groups Are Not a Repackaged Trend: Buying groups are distinct from target personas. They represent the actual people involved in complex purchase decisions, and mapping these "buying group constellations" across business units and opportunities is critical for enterprise sellers.

Closing Note: Davis delivers a grounded and candid look at how the GTM landscape is shifting beneath the surface. For marketing and revenue leaders looking to align their teams around a unified account strategy and cut through vendor-driven buzzwords, this episode lays out a practical framework for thinking about where and how to invest.

Transcript

0:05

Welcome to the Revenue Exchange with your host Davis Potter. We're back. We have another Solo Revenue Exchange podcast today. First off, I am so excited to officially announce the release. Of the revenue vault. This is our all in one portal where you will be able to access our full library of frameworks, models, research. We have our tech and vendor marketplace in there as well. This links out to our community. And for the first 100 insider membership subscribers, you will also have access at no additional charge for our flagship live ABM certification course, which is dropping in May. So if you have not checked out the revenue vault, there is also a free pathway to enter. Go check it out. Get on our community membership. Be one of the first 100. So psyched to have you there. And this is also where we have all of our community events as well as exclusive events. So if you wanna see what for X is up to or where you can go to find a better place to stay ahead and also grow your career and your professional, actual ABM program in and of itself. The revenue vault is the place to go, so psyched to see you there. Okay, let's get into it. For this podcast, I have a running list of topics and all of these have been accumulated through conversations over the past few weeks with either ABM leaders, some heads of marketing CMOs, as well as ABM managers, and. What's unique about this is there are some trends that are happening that are not being spoken on nearly enough. You have all of your classic regurgitated headlines that you see on LinkedIn. You'll see on webinar titles or all of these pieces of content that are rinse and repeat from the past six months, but the market is actually shifting and there are some changes that we are going to talk about. As well as repositioning and thinking about some core principles in a separate and distinct way, which is not necessarily a groundbreaking revelation in the ABM sense, but it's something that you need to be thinking about, and it's something that's working incredibly well from a positioning standpoint with the C-Suite as well as sales leaders. Let's get into it. So first off, it's official ABM and Demand Generation are converging and have converged in a lot of organizations. Two years ago when we first initially launched for Jex, we went out with. This whole conception of account-based GTM, your account-based go-to market strategy is how your organization should be aligning your marketing, sales, customer success, all backed behind this unified account based go-to market strategy that a few years ago was a really hot and pressing topic, and we were seeing organizations do it. But now we're at the point 24 plus months later where this is becoming a trend that is too big to ignore. It is something that so many demand gen teams are starting to do, and we're gonna get on that in a moment. But this convergence behind ABM and demand gen, it has real actual world examples and application. It's happening at a rapid pace. One of the things that I want to talk about, first off, is this reintegration of ABM teams into demand gen or demand gen integrated campaigns. They could have multiple different names, but what's actually happening, and this is something we are going to push on for the entirety of 2026 and beyond, is we are seeing. This account investment strategy continuously pop up, and all it does is threads the needle behind ABM, demand gen, and then also brand from a marketing perspective and ties in sales and customer success back under this umbrella. An account investment strategy is the way in which your organization. Is deploying its budget, resources, and capacity towards a unified subset of target accounts. And you also have, on one end you have your target account marketing, which is essentially where ABM and Demand Gen have converged into. You also have brand. You can't discredit or discount brand under your account investment strategy. They all fall under this same core bucket. And when thinking about the reintegration of ABM teams back into demand, gen teams, we touched on this very lightly in our last podcast, but we have to get into it today because when you go out and you look at some of the most mature ABM. Programs that had entire standalone teams, often across multiple GOs, across multiple different industries or verticals in terms of coverage, these are the programs that if you look hard enough. It will be, it'll be pretty easy to understand. Alright, what are the programs that are most widely known? Okay. Let me go ask around and look under the hood and figure out what's actually going on. When you do, I'll tell you exactly what you're going to find. You will find that these teams have taken their standalone ABM teams and reintegrated them back into their integrated campaigns or demand gen teams, and some are doing this better than others. Let's break that down. So an example of an organization that's doing this really well, they took their ABM team. Instead of just saying, okay, we're going to let go and lay off X amount of people on this team, and then we are just going to essentially take the org chart, visualize an org chart in your mind, and then you have ABM on one side and you have demand gen on the other. And what they did was they just, I imagine the little boxes with all of the team members, they just took'em and then plugged them into demand gen without a truly integr, without a true integration strategy. That is what was happening on one end of the, of the spectrum. And on the other end, you have organizations that instead of doing that, they did it in a thoughtful and a meaningful way. As in they took their actual ABM team, they're enabling their demand gen team on ABM principles. And they're building this really cohesive and strong program because as ABM and Demand Gen Converge, if we're actually looking into the details and we're being real about this, what's really happening is Demand Gen is just adopting account-based principles at scale. I don't care what you call it. There are so many people who wanna talk about the specific naming conventions or whatnot. Is it just. Targeted demand, how do we actually define it? What is one to many? one thing that I can't stand by the way, just a quick side note. Is when people try and say programmatic ABM, we're deploying one-to-one and one to few. Oh, if you're not actually executing programmatic ABM as well, you're completely missing out. As in, okay, let's go review your actually actual campaign plans. Let's look at what you're doing for programmatic, because what you're really doing. If we're going to get technical behind this is you're just taking assets that you created in your one-to-one and your one to few programs, and you're just throwing them over at the digital marketing team and saying, Hey, let's run these. Let's run these and let's go get engagement on these target accounts. You're just, you're creating digital campaigns and by the way. Tell me about how your actual, true and tried metrics are looking behind that because you, they usually do not have really strong metrics behind that programmatic, so essentially you're just throwing money over at accounts and in some form of awareness state without a cohesive campaign plan because your ABM practitioners are so focused on one-to-one and one to few. Where I'm going with this is. What's happening are account based marketing principles such as targeting and segmentation, such as measurement and reporting, not merely focusing entirely on leads or MQ ls in a first touch or last touch sourced style of measurement. There are also, not. Organized in a way in which they're so merely focused on just driving top of funnel leads that they throw over to sales. It's a integrated and really a partnership between marketing and sales. And then when there's a customer component to this or there's an expansion or retention component to this customer, success is also involved. So what I want you to do is. Think about the way in which this is being operated or orchestrated. Let's think about it. If you were to create an account investment strategy in your organization, what are you thinking about? You're thinking about what are, what do I actually sell? What are my products and services? Where do I sell them? Who are the best fit? Potential customers. Where do they live in terms of the segments? And segments are usually industry. And then what you're also doing is you're then going, okay, great. Let's look at some of our historical data. Let's see where we're winning. Let's see where we're winning larger, where we're winning faster. Okay, here are the areas where this is occurring. Now what we're going to do is as a business. For your go-to market strategy. That's why we called it an account-based go-to market strategy, because this involves your go-to market strategy, and the way in which we think about a go-to market strategy at four x is we think about it as the way in which your organization, your revenue teams, your go-to market teams are actually taking your product or service and selling it. How are you doing that? And it's not just selling it in terms of what are the salespeople doing? What are their outreach cadences, but it's actually marketing, sales, customer success. How are these teams that are all configured in order to drive revenue and retain revenue? How are they configured to be successful? And the account is the autonom unit. Around all of this, it's not an individual person. Individual people in large, complex enterprise deals that have an 180 day sales cycle, it's not being made by one person. Maybe there are some crazy outliers. I haven't seen it. The wide scale research does not correlate with that either. But when we think about these complex deals, what I want you to think about is, okay, you have accounts. Within accounts. There are often business units across those business units. You then have buying groups. Within those buying groups, you have contacts, so you have all of these different dimensions, and even that is a simplistic version within each of those accounts. What is the actual revenue potential and what is the strategic importance of winning that account? Let's keep it clean and simple. There are other dimensions behind this, but let's make it really simplistic for this. Then you wanna think about, for the three areas that I have in terms of. Inputs to drive and retain revenue. I have budget, I have resources that are existing and I have capacity. Budget can fuel resources and capacity, but all three of these are scarce. So how do you think about. What accounts make the most sense for you to deploy X amount of budget, resources, and capacity into so that you can drive the highest revenue potential for your business? And the reason why I bring up strategic importance as well, sometimes there are lighthouse accounts or iconic reference logos where if you close a deal an X, Y, Z account, all the halo effect will be so significant. That you will, you'll win the revenue potential might not be with that specific account, but what will occur as an offset of it, because others look to that account as a really important or a, the market leader. So if they see that they have bought your solution, others are going to be more inclined to also buy your solution so that they can keep up with that market leader. That's another thing to think about as well. Essentially, you're trying to uncover, okay, where are the accounts that have the highest revenue potential? How do I make sure that I'm effectively deploying those elements into them now, where people are going to come at me for this and I wanna make sure that this is incredibly clear. I am not saying when you're building your target account list to merely go off of revenue potential because there are so many other dimensions that you should be thinking about. what does the engagement already look like? we're gonna actually cover that in this podcast, but what I'm trying to get at with this is overall. Even before you select your target account list, how do you understand what segments make the most sense to invest in? You need to look at what does your average contract value look like as well, because if you are trying to match your deployment models from an ABM perspective across. The, your go-to overarching go-to market strategy and the profile of your company. If you only have an a CV of$50,000 deploying enterprise, one-to-one ABM, the math doesn't even math, and you're just going to be, you'll be in the red. So actually, I do want to talk about that for a minute. So think about, going, taking a step back 10,000 foot lens when thinking about your account investment strategy, let's first think about the way in which ABM and Demand Gen can be deployed. What do the actual deployment models look like? You have one-to-one, you have one to few, and you have one to many. Let's even remove ABM off of the end of them. What is one-to-one demand generation? What is one to few demand generation? I don't know it. I don't care what you call it. At the end of the day, it all wraps into your account investment strategy. But what I do care about is the way in which those counts accounts are treated based off of the investment. So actually looking at, okay, what does revenue potential look like? Where are the areas that have the higher revenue potential? How should I invest my marketing dollars and align that with the actual business and what makes sense. So you've got one-to-one, one to few, one to many, one to many. Again, there are one to many has. There are so many ways that you can configure this, and what I wanna be explicitly clear about is one of the components of one to many or what we refer to as at as growth ABM at Forge X because we put a stronger operating model behind it is you will effectively tier your accounts. And prioritize how much investment you will be making into those accounts based off of their tier and that scales as well. You can do that across a thousand plus accounts and you can do that across 400 accounts. So growth ABM, or the way in which we look at one to many. You have a lot more leeway to structure it, and that is where this whole concept of demand gen and ABM integration can convergence the converging of both of them. That's where that's really coming from because demand gen is effectively just taking one to many and scaling it, but you have all these deployment models and the difference between an ABM practitioner who's covering one to many versus one-to-one, they have different skill sets. Their campaigns look different, their investment looks different. But looking at it from a business lens, if you have an account, you have revenue potential of an a hundred million dollars deal within an account, and you've already sold a hundred million dollars deals historically, and you have a co, you have four accounts that have a hundred million plus opportunities within them. this is a pretty extreme example'cause I'm sure a lot of you who are listening to this probably don't have a hundred million dollar, average contract values, or not average contract values, but a hundred million dollar potential opportunities in accounts. But there are some, most likely who do. and we see that a lot in the larger organizations. But let's take this for example. If you close that a hundred million dollars opportunity, doesn't it make sense to have a dedicated marketer who is in lockstep. With the sales team building really personalized and custom campaigns for that one account that's deeply targeted at the actual buying group, and they're partnering with sales and if it's an expansion play, customer success is involved. And what they're doing is they're actually working to map. Who is part of the buying group so that they can give those buying group members a really bespoke and custom treatment, not only just for the buying group as a whole, but mapping back to the roles and the personas of the people that are in the buying group. If you have an opportunity or you have revenue potential in an account, that's that high, doesn't it make sense? Think about the way in which sales is structured as well. In these accounts, they usually have either one or multiple account executives who are aligned to that account and all their, the entirety of the way in which the business is investing is into the sales side, is that the business is saying there's so much revenue potential here that if we close this account. The ROI on our costs will be incredible. So it makes sense for us to take the risk and actually assign a dedicated or multiple salespeople specifically on this one account to go work it and try and close it. And we probably have a really long sales cycle. So from the marketing side, it's okay, this is our unified account investment strategy. We are going to also do this, and that is the whole concept of one-to-one marketing. Maybe instead of calling it ABM, we just call it marketing. One-to-one, marketing one to few marketing, one to many Marketing, growth marketing. Think about one to few. it's the same concept. You, instead of thinking about it as ABM and demand gen, you have to pull back and think about it from an overarching business. Perspective, and this is what really resonates with the C-Suite by the way. And all this also really resonates with sales because they are so numbers focused where it's how are we going to map back the way in which we invest in accounts based off of what the actual business. Needs, how do we make the most out of our investment in accounts, not thinking about channel investments as a portfolio. Thinking about the accounts in which you deploy the channel mix into as the account portfolio or your target account portfolio. And then looking at how the channels are performing. Inside of your target account portfolio as a whole. So I just spent a lot of time ranting on that, but it truly is, it's the concept of target account marketing versus brand one-to-one, marketing, one to few marketing, growth marketing or one to many, and you are just leveling off the amount in which you are investing. In each of the various different accounts and you're deploying your investments differently. It might be weird to think about it in this way, but you as an employee of the company, they are investing in you. You are actually part of the account investment strategy that goes to the ABM practitioner that goes to you as a integrated campaigns. Manager, because effectively what they're working to do is they're saying, okay, if I pay this person$175,000 a year, plus benefits, plus some stock options, the return, because their skills, their knowledge, their capabilities, their ability to create these campaigns and orchestrate the investment. We are going to give them from a budget and a resources perspective, we believe that their capacity is going to be able to orchestrate one, how they invest in the actual accounts from a. Where are we making the investment? What accounts, how, what is the deployment model? And then two, how are we going to use our budget and our resources to actually create a campaign And those, that campaign or those multiple campaigns that all roll up under the program that is going to yield US revenue and retention for the actual business. So you as a whole, you were part of this account investment strategy. Just as an FYI. It's really weird to look at it or it's abstract to look at it from that lens sometimes, because you can feel so embedded in the company and part of the company, but at the end of the day, you are just like you. You're essentially a consultant that is on a contract that is ever running, and maybe you get some equity inside of that company. But full-time employment. This is a conversation that I've had with people who are thinking about changing their jobs. People who might have just recently been experienced a layoff or have been let go from their organization, but at the end of the day, the contract that you sign for full-time employment is really just a contract saying, I am a. I'm going to consult and execute on this organization's behalf, and you are going to pay me X amount of money and I'm going to take X amount of benefits. Oh, and then also you might give me some equity in the organization in some type of form or some stock in the organization, and that is a form of payment for the execution and the consulting and the strategy work that. I'm doing, and it's a two-way contract, so they can let you go at any point and you can leave at any point. What's the difference between that and a six month contract? It's just that component of usually the benefits and it's that, that, again, that's a pretty simplistic view because there are also other pieces like stock, it might have a four year cliff and then what happens after those four years, or other components. Thinking about it in, in that regard. The next thing that I do really want to talk about, because quite frankly I'm getting a little fed up by this, where there is so much conversation happening around why ABM programs fail. why they fail, the first attempt, why they fail the second attempt. And it is so critically important to understand the components as to why they do fail. But the fatigue that I'm feeling behind this is I am talking to these ABM leaders every single day and what the good is that so many of them are some of my best friends. In the world. they've done incredible things at their organization, but the hardest part for me to stomach is the horse reality of the macroeconomic climate that we're living in the world that we're living in today. And people are losing their jobs. Layoffs are happening, people are, people get let go and it's Difficult when you see this narrative just continuously being spun and pushed out in the market of why they fail. It's if they fail, it's so important to make sure that you know how they fail and alleviate the pain from it. But the negativity behind that is just killing me because I'm seeing people get let go. I'm hearing about it, doing everything I can to try and help them find a new opportunity, but it is. It is the weight that comes with a failed ABM program. You have an actual, tangible human being. That human being, they probably, or they might own a home, have two car payments. They have two kids. They're thinking about daycare costs. They're thinking about how do I, am I not going to have enough money to go on that vacation for February break? What do I do now? Should I go do contract work? Should I try and find another full-time? I need money. Everybody needs an income in order to live the life in which they're living. And when ABM programs fail, a lot of the times it, one of two things are going to happen. One, it's either that ABM leader, it's gonna be deemed a failure, and that ABM leader is going to be. Reintegrated into some other team. Maybe it's field marketing, maybe it's demand gen. And not to be confused, I know we were talking about the convergence of ABM and demand gen, but I'm merely thinking about this in an ABM pilot state where there are a lot of less mature organizations who are piloting ABM for the first time and they have a standalone ABM manager. It's either they're being reintegrated into the organization in some capacity, or what's happening is they're being let go, and when they're let go, they have to jump back on the job hunt. Everybody has a unique situation. Medical bills can be stacking and it's just it's so real around the failure of ABM. And I think for me. it's just getting a little challenging to see people talk about ABM failure. ABM failure. Because I'm just seeing people get let go and it's not even, a lot of the times it's not even because ABM failed in their organization, but it's just, it's a tough time right now. It really is. And even, I have a lot of conversations with ABM leaders who are in these larger organizations too. And you've seen it in the news. A lot of these larger organizations, they've had multiple rounds of layoffs, and there's just a sense of fatigue and morale drop in a lot of these companies where everyone has in the back of their mind, am I going to be next? And. 12, 24 months ago when layoffs rounds were just starting to get cooking. And in some instances, even before that, the fear was more real. And the question was, okay, what's actually going on? Is there something wrong here? Why are we starting to see these layoffs, or, I understand why we needed these layoffs, but then they just keep happening and their friends are continuously. Being let go or people that they didn't think were going to be let go are being let go or they're being impacted. And what's happening and where we are now, the state earlier was a sense of anxiety. And where we are now is more, it's more so a sense of fatigue. Everyone is just so numb to it. And the conversations in the C-suite around how can AI either alleviate my need for this new headcount? Can AI just, can we configure it in some capacity to actually do the role? Those are happening. I promise you that, and that's not to scare you, but I would be dishonest. If I wasn't sharing what is actually happening, and so how the, so what behind that is control what you can control. Control the inputs. Optimize the inputs, control how you show up. Continue working hard. How cheesy is that again, when going back to this account investment strategy, sometimes they just, there is no. There's no capability to stop the layoff. even though you've done everything you possibly can, even though you've been working incredibly hard, maybe you just got promoted. Sometimes it is just a numbers game, and that numbers game can be for a multitude of reasons. Maybe they're looking for an acquisition and they needed to make some cuts. it's a tough time. It is. Alright, let's get back to it. let's jump to a different topic because. I don't wanna talk about that the whole entire time. The next thing that I do want to talk about is let's get into buying groups for a minute. At the time of this recording, I joined one of my good friends', customer advisory board. Earlier this morning and we had great conversation talking about some unpublished four x research insights as well as market trends for 2026. The audience was, director plus. So think, more on the leadership side for those listening for some context. And one of the things that we actually did talk about was buying groups and had an awesome. Conversation as well inside of our four JX community where someone was mentioning, I'm not gonna name your name on here, just merely I don't know why.'cause I can't get your permission before actually. but call me out in a LinkedIn post on this for it. this person also really good friend by the way. the question around that was. Is buying groups? Is it just repackaging target personas under a new label so that platforms and technology vendors can resell, buy-in groups, solutions, or some of the large analyst firms just using buying groups as another made up trend or repackaged trend so that they can sell more of their consulting and advisory services? And the answer to that is no. No, it is not just a repackaging of a trend, and it's something that you should really intensely focus around because one, it's the now, two, it's the past, and three, it is undoubtedly not going away. It. It actually is the future because tech and the way in which our systems are being architectured now will actually allow for buying groups to be a real thing in the future. As we're historically, we just, we semi had the infrastructure, but it's not just another vendor trend when thinking about target personas, that's the blanket at, okay, what are the personas typically look like around who buys our product? Your buying group is who are the people who most likely, are inside of the decision making unit that will actually buy our product? They sound pretty similar, don't they? here's where it shifts. Yes. Before you actually understand who the named people are. Who those contacts are inside of an account that are part of the buying group, you are going to have to use historical analysis to help work and uncover and target. Titles or identify the people who are most likely part of the buying group because you just don't have, you lack the account intelligence to definitively say, these are the people. Or you might have a couple people who you know, but you still have a lot that are unknown. And so the buying group, those are the people, the actual people. Your target personas and the buying group. The buying group is the group of the people that are made up by the target personas, but it's how do we actually look at the individuals who are going to make the purchase decisions? How do we look at what their roles are, what their influences in the actual buying process? How do we look at their perception of our organization and our product? How do we do that? Both really in depth and granular. In a one-to-one marketing state, but then also how do we do that at scale in a more growth or one-to-many marketing state? And so buy-in groups are so critically important because if you think back, we referenced it earlier in this podcast, but if you think back at account business unit buying group contact. At the far end on account, that's where you're getting your mqa. And at the other end, the contact, that's where historically you would get the lead or the MQL, but right in between in the messy middle is buying groups and those buying groups. Sometimes you could have buying group members. Span across multiple business units. If you have someone who is overseeing a business unit, they can be part of multiple buying groups. You can have some people that are across multiple opportunities as well. And what we call these are buying group constellations because if you look up at the sky at night and you look for an actual constellation, you see how it's configured. And it's not orderly and clean. And if you are pursuing multiple opportunities with different products inside of an organization, it, you're gonna map these constellations. So buying groups are not just another vendor trend buying groups. If you sell an enterprise complex product. That's the way in which they buy transactional. If they can just swipe it on a credit card, that's different. If it's a$20 purchase, you're probably not going to need a buying group for that. But if it's a$20,000, if it's a$200,000, if it's a$200 million purchase, there will be multiple people that are involved in actually making. Decision and influencing the outcome of the buying process and which vendor is selected, so you better be mapping and making sure that you are properly engaging each of those individuals. In closing on our next podcast. I wanna try to get a guest on here. We do have a few guests that are lined up for the next two, but I wanna get a guest on here to talk about building an actual unified target account list. And the inputs and the signals that go into it, because signals is another topic that is not crystal clear. There are so many vendors who have picked up on the word signal. Reconfigured the definition behind it in order to map back to the product so that they can market it and ride the signal wave. And it's confusing marketers. It's at scale. Everyone is trying to uncover what actually is a signal. And you have all these terms like signal based orchestration, signal based architecture. What's a first party signal versus a second party and a third party? How do we actually capture them across all of our platforms and technology? Does AI have a component? If yes, are we using it effectively? Are there tools and vendors that could help us use it more effectively to harvest all of the signals, interpret the signals, action on the signals? Do we have the right internal processes to do this effectively? And that being across marketing and sales, and sometimes customer success signals is a very hot topic. But I will close on that. If you have not checked out the revenue vault or not joined as a minimum as a community member, because there is no cost associated to that, highly recommend getting the Insider membership because it unlocks so much more. And for a limited time until we hit that first 100 member list, you will get. A live eight hour instructor led ABM certification included in the instructors. We haven't dropped who their names are yet, but you will be very excited. They're some of the top in the world. I've worked with them, but. I've also, actually, I don't wanna give too much on that. More to come stay tuned. Thank you so much for joining. So psyched to catch one our next podcast, so psyched to see you inside of the revenue vault and inside of our community. If you have any questions or topics that would be really helpful to break down on the next one, please reach out to me directly on LinkedIn or in our community and psych to see you there.